Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Conferences, Forums, and Writings

It has been some time since I touched this blog. Thanks to Lee F. for his recent email bump "the blogosphere misses you" for reminding me of gap. I'll try to play a bit of catch up with today's posting.

I also need to refresh my postings to https://firmware.intel.com/blog but I have to admit that I prefer the Blogger interface - it auto-saves the content, it doesn't ask me to update my password every time I log in, it's easy to important graphics,....

And I'm really glad to see Tim Lewis blogging again http://uefi.blogspot.com/. He's one of the most talented guys I know in this industry and I enjoy reading his postings almost as much as I enjoy talking with him in person.

On the coreboot payload package, in retrospect this code could have been generalized to the 'UEFI Payload Package.' Although the coreboot package has cbmem as its input data structures, which are then converted to HOB's, DXE and a UEFI implementation are easily launched from any environment with a HOB list. In fact, in the early days of Framework development we have a PEI shell command that would launch the DXE from the EFI Shell by just forging a HOB list. So this payload package could subsume today's DuetPkg https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/tree/master/DuetPkg, or EDKII on a PC/AT BIOS. Or the payload could be appended to U-Boot http://www.denx.de/wiki/view/U-Boot as an alternative to U-Boot native EFI implementation http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2016-February/244378.html, perhaps?

The coreboot conference was at a Google office near the waterfront in San Francisco, with the following view from the Google cafe.

About the Speaker

Vincent Zimmer Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation

Vincent Zimmer is a Senior Principal Engineer in the Intel Software and Services Group. Vincent has been working on the EFI team since 1999 and presently chairs the UEFI Security and Network Subteams in the UEFI Forum www.uefi.org. He has authored several books and articles on firmware.

The poster chat provided a lot of discussion with members of the industry around data center host firmware and deployment, including interest in HTTP-S style deployments in lieu of today's TFTP-based PXE.It was great to see Kushagra https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/author/kvaid/on stage during the data center keynote, too.

The intent of such material is to provide rationale and some guidance on how one might successfully refine the standards into a working artifact, including ones based upon EDKII style technology.Well, so much for a catch-up blog. I wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving tomorrow from the always raining-in-November Seattle area.